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62 pages 2 hours read

Chandler Baker

Whisper Network

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapters 17-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 Summary

On March 31, Rosalita asks her son Salomon if his homework is finished. She is trying to get him into private school and is proud of his native fluency in English—she moved to the United States in middle school and did not master the second language as well as she’d like. Salomon shows his mother the airplane captain pin that Ardie recently gave him. Rosalita feels a pang of sadness and jealousy—she has never been on an airplane, while Ardie’s been on so many that she can give pins away to other people’s kids. She doesn’t want this piece of the office in their house and takes the pin, telling Solomon that he might get hurt if he sleeps with it.

At Truviv, the cleaning staff cannot park in the lot. This rule is intended to make it harder for the cleaning staff to steal. Rosalita tells Crystal not to eat the candies from the secretaries’ desk. Rosalita drops the pilot pin in a trash bag, telling herself that she’s doing what is best for her son, not herself. After knocking twice on the corner office door with no answer, Rosalita enters. She sees Katherine and hears a man’s voice, skin rubbing against fabric, and spit. Rosalita is so surprised that she slams herself against the door. She tells Crystal not to go into that office and goes to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. She is panicked about something from her past: “Her body, she knew, had always had the better memory” (173).

Chapter 18 Summary

Sloane is convincing herself that it is not the right time to tell Ardie the thing that she needs to tell her. When Abigail’s phone buzzes, Sloane sees texts from two boys calling Abigail a tattletale and telling her that she is not invited to the party that all the other kids are going to. Another student divided all the girls in Abigail’s class into cool or not; all of the not cool girls then received the same misogynist texts that Abigail had. After this second batch of texts, Sloane is livid. She knows that Derek will try to talk her down, so she lies to him, saying she has work to finish. In actuality, she writes a legal memorandum to the school district pointing out that both students and schools can be held liable if peers die by suicide due to bullying. Knowing that it will seem more serious coming from someone else, she signs Ardie’s name, convincing herself that this is not fraud.

In the deposition transcript at the end of the chapter, Helen Yeh questions Bobbi Garrett about her marriage to Ames. Bobbi believes that Sloane added her husband to the list for personal gain, but when Mrs. Yeh asks Bobbi to name the women who have accused famous men, like Clarence Thomas or Bill Cosby, of sexual assault, Bobbi is unable to, proving Mrs. Yeh’s point that women gain little from coming forward about sexual assault. Bobbi claims that believing all women is ludicrous.

Chapter 19 Summary

Ardie puts the finishing details on decorations for Michael’s birthday party. Like many women, she is a bit of a perfectionist. When the doorbell rings, she is automatically annoyed at Tony—she told him not to ring in case Michael was asleep. Michael runs to greet his father. Ardie feared that Tony would care less for Michael after their divorce because Michael is adopted, but this hasn’t proven true. Actually, Michael is becoming even more similar to his father. Ardie misses talking about Michael with Tony. Now, they watch their son in silence.

In the chapter ending deposition transcript, Mrs. Sharpe asks Ardie about Michael’s birthday party. Ardie says that, based on what happened next, it was not a good idea to invite Katherine to the party.

Chapter 20 Summary

The first-person plural narrator claims that women cannot thrive while trying to parent and work. They are stretched so thin that they think it is no wonder that one of them eventually snapped.

On April 1, Rosalita and Salomon arrive at Ardie’s big, expensive house. Rosalita worries that Salomon will one day pity her; she reminds him that he is here to work at the party, not have fun. Rosalita finds it hard to believe that Ardie ever feels stress while living somewhere so nice. She is surprised by how clean the house is, given Ardie’s disheveled appearance. As Salomon gets into costume, Ardie tells Rosalita how well he is doing in their lessons. Salomon’s school identified him as gifted and told Rosalita he needed to attend a better school, so Ardie has been helping him prepare for an entrance exam to a private school with scholarships. Rosalita thinks that Ardie teaches Salomon so that she doesn’t have to be home alone while Michael is at Tony’s. Rosalita meets Sloane, and Abigail and Salomon hang out. When Katherine and Grace arrive, Rosalita and Katherine avoid one another, as Rosalita remembers what she saw the other night in the office.

Chapter 21 Summary

Sloane and Katherine get increasingly tipsy. Sloane wants to ask Rosalita if their children can have a playdate, but fears that she is being condescending and privileged. Meanwhile, a tipsy Katherine reveals that she has worked to get rid of her working-class Boston access and that she was fired from her last job at Frost Klein. She had noticed a statistical discrepancy and was told to keep quiet about it. When the firm’s partner noticed, she was forced to take the blame. Sloane says Katherine “must have wanted to kill” (209) the partner that got her fired, and Katherine agrees.

As they leave the party, Tony and his wife Braylee invite Sloane and Derek to an event. Ardie overhears this and is deeply upset that Sloane has not told her that she has been hanging out with Tony and Braylee. Ardie claims that she’s not mad, but she clearly is.

Sloane wonders if it is true that she keeps secrets not to hurt other people. She knows the memorandum was dramatic and decides not to tell Derek about it.

Chapters 17-21 Analysis

This section fleshes out Sloane and Rosalita. The contrast between the two shows how their experiences of womanhood are intersectionally affected by class and race. Sloane tends to act out of self-interest: She writes the memorandum without telling Ardie or Derek and delays telling Ardie that she is friends with Tony and Braylee, all the while convincing herself that she is in the right. The behavior is a symptom of Sloane’s privilege—as a rich, white woman, she is used to getting what she wants. Even Sloane’s self-awareness does little to change her self-centeredness. She wonders whether asking Rosalita for their children to have a playdate is condescending, but makes the dilemma all about her: “Sloane hated all these ethical jigsaw puzzles. Wasn’t it enough that she liked everyone? She’d never met a person that she couldn’t talk to properly. But no, that was apparently naive of her. Or, an uglier word she’d learned—privileged” (202).

Rosalita, a poor, single mother of color, lives outside the mostly white, extremely wealthy world of Truviv. Although both Sloane and Rosalita are impacted by misogyny and sexism, Sloane has the social power to make demands, while Rosalita must be constantly wary of making the wrong move—her family’s survival is always directly on the line. In response, Rosalita acts self-protectively and is always on the defensive. Aware that Truviv makes the classist and racist assumptions that the cleaners are constantly waiting to steal, Rosalita warns Crystal not to eat candy from the secretaries’ desk. At Ardie’s party, Rosalita preps her son on how to act in a rich, white space, worrying about not knowing mores like whether to take off her shoes. Rosalita’s intersectional identities affect her mothering too. While all the women in the book struggle to feel like good-enough mothers, Rosalita additionally worries about her son resenting or pitying her for being poor and unpartnered.

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